Monthly Archives: October 2013

{Excerpt} Exemplifying a community-minded approach, ‘SuspendedSentences’ was a large artist-led group exhibition and series of events including experimental film, music and sound nights, taking place at an old unused fish processing factory, Turners Warehouse in Newlyn, Cornwall 2-22 Sept 2013. The exhibition formed an open response to Armitage’s poetry, after his 2013 walk along the South West coast path from Minehead to Land’s End with his last mainland reading happening at Newlyn Art School. Regional artists were invited by the project’s curators Jesse Leroy Smith and Mark Spray, to take Armitage’s poetry as a departure point or to explore the idea of a journey. The show’s title references poet Simon Armitage’s past employment as a probation officer, or as Armitage added on hearing it, could be reminiscent of poetry being written in zero gravity.

In view of it being National Poetry Day today, I scribbled down a conversation I had last night with a Glasgow taxi driver.

Have You Ever Seen the Rain

I am a sinny man yet God loves me
This is unconditional love
If I love Rod Stewart
Why does he charge £70 a ticket?
This is not unconditional love
Rod needs to look at this
I love the rain
With every raindrop there is an angel
The rain falls from so high up
It is from God
Rain is a mercy
If you are ill, if you are hurting
Just ask the rain
And it will help you
I hope to meet you in heaven
And if we do
You will tell me
Taxi driver, you were right

Have You Ever Seen the Rain, Rod Stewart, Composer: John Fogerty (1970 – released 1971, Rod Stewart cover version 2006)

Axisweb asked curators from across the country to browse their directory and pick one work to write about. I selected Lucienne Cole’s, ‘Dance to Music’, 2012.

[excerpt]

Morrissey was not afraid in the 1980s’ to move his body, arms and legs to the music. Upping the confidence of others perceived as misfits, he spawned a generation of young male lone dancers happy to spiral away in their own world on the dance floor….